11th April, 1891 — Ari’s House, Bartonburg

He’d been on the night shift, and probably wouldn’t have slept anyway, probably wouldn’t be able to sleep until everyone was safe and home. But his only obligation today was being home with Elliott, and mercifully one of them at least was in a cheerful mood.

Though if Elliott - currently playing with his toys on the sitting room floor - were not such a good distraction, Ari didn’t think he would be holding it together half as well. Not that he was even holding it together, exactly: he didn’t know why he kept picking up the letter that had come from Alfred Darrow today and rereading it when it only made him feel worse. To Darrow’s credit, it had been kindly meant, supposed to do the opposite... but the truth was he had not been worried in the slightest about his wife. Dio was a talented mediwitch, he’d always known that; the scrapes and bruises were hardly welcome news but that she had only gone out with the rescue team meant she had not been in real danger to begin with, not like -

But maybe that man she’d saved just happened to have been him, he told himself again, desperately scouring the letter for new details that did not materialise no matter how much he wanted them to. He’d fixed Ben up from so many disasters the auror had scraped through that practically every piece of him had been stitched back together at some point or another, even his memory... he would get through this. Perhaps he hadn’t needed saving at all, had been lucky, gotten himself out of it somehow. It was going to be fine. It had to be fine.

Still, Ari breathed a sigh of relief from his spot on the floor when the fire turned green and Zelda stepped through. He had sent her a note earlier to say he was in all day and she could stop by if she needed somewhere to be; he had been surprised she hadn’t gone with the others, in truth, and felt a little sorry for her being stuck at home, useless and waiting in the last place she would want to be. “Hi,” he said, offering her (at least a brief attempt at) a smile, and a cursory look to see what sort of state she was in.

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@"Zelda Fisk" / Cassius Lestrange

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   J. Alfred Darrow, Zelda Darrow

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Xena had gotten married nearly two weeks ago today, and Zelda hadn't been sleeping well even before Alfred and Delight and Dionisia and Konstantin went to perform a rescue operation without her. She was a ball of energy in motion most of the time, with nowhere to put it — she would have almost welcomed something disastrous in Hogsmeade at this point because at least then she would have had something to do this weekend other than sitting around, waiting to hear from Alfred and not hearing anything from Alfred. She felt like one of the women in stories waiting for their husbands to return from the sea after some military nonsense, and she hated it. Not because she thought Alfred was in danger — he was demonstrably fairly good at not getting lost at sea — but because she was not the sort of person who could do this, be stuck at home waiting for news instead of saving people when there were people to be saved.

So she looked tired; not the sort of weary exhausted tired that work often got her, but the snappy pent-up sort of tired that came from being on the edge. She'd been happy to get the letter from Ari inviting her to come over, because she was not sure how much longer Brannon was going to tolerate her rattling around the house.

"Hi," Zelda said; she stepped out of the fireplace with her mouth already set into a thin and unhappy line. She dropped onto the floor next to him, with Elliott playing happily and Ari looking even more tired than she was. "I hate this." No use pretending with him, he had to have known what she was feeling when he wrote her.

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He had expected her to be in a prickly mood, restless at best. For once, though, this was almost a comfort. They weren’t at odds about anything, and neither of them liked being useless, so Zelda could understand at least that much of it, and - well, sometimes it was just better to vent it than let it eat him up alone. So - “I know,” Ari said, letting out another drawn-out exhale, and by that he meant me too.

He picked up one of Elliott’s loose building blocks from the floor by them, running his thumb along the corners of the wood and clenching it absently in hand as he looked her over again.

Ari had opened his mouth to say something - did she want tea, did she want a snack; he had not had the focus to sit down for a meal alone and had been comfort-eating sugary things to stay awake instead, so there was plenty of food in the kitchen - but what came out was not what he had intended to start with. “Have you heard - anything new?”

He was supposed to be distracting her from everyone off saving people without them, was the thing, not dwelling on it. Besides, it was a far-fetched thought to think anything Alfred or Dionisia or Kons had possibly told Zelda would be any more reassuring to him than the letter he’d gotten. They certainly wouldn’t mention a particular passenger, and even the details in Darrow’s hadn’t done anything to ease the fears - so unless she’d just heard in the last hour that everyone aboard is miraculously safe and actually no one had died and everyone was on their way home, news was not going to help.

And if there was more bad news, Ari wasn’t sure he was ready to hear it.

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   Zelda Darrow

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At least they were both clearly unhappy, allies in being stuck at home when their partners were off at sea and trying to actually save people. (She couldn't call Alfred her spouse, and maybe partners was the wrong word for whatever was going on with Ari and Dio, but she didn't have a better word.)

"No," Zelda said, a little sorely, but not at him. She grabbed one of Elliott's blocks and spun it in her hand, "I've scarcely heard anything at all." She hadn't heard from Alfred, essentially — although she knew from the Ministerial chain of command that he had been sending missives to Ross — and she was, frankly, annoyed about it. But she didn't want to admit to being annoyed, because then it might be a thing, and so —

"Have you?"

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AMAZING set by MJ

Ari smiled dryly when she picked up a block as well. Elliott was too absorbed in building a cluster of towers and mumbling to himself to notice the absence of a few stray pieces, so Ari held onto his, balancing it absently on his knee as Zelda admitted she’d heard nothing else.

She had returned the question, but he paused, deliberating whether it was best to say less rather than more on this. He glanced over his shoulder at the letter perched on the arm of the armchair behind him, creased and fingermarked from all the rereading. No, better to tell her than pass it over, since Darrow had mentioned her at the beginning of it. It was hardly unflattering and certainly not untrue, but Ari wasn’t sure ‘obviously I know she cares, but’ would be the sentiment she wanted to hear from him right now, nor praising her for her dedication the work that she was not actually getting to do.

“No, not much,” Ari agreed nonetheless, chewing on the sentence in doubt. Not enough. “Alfred wrote just to say Dionisia’s fine, safe and well and being of great help, but -”

He had tried to smile at her at this, because that was good and Zelda should be glad to hear about Dio, and that he and Darrow were still getting along - but the smile sputtered out too soon, a muscle clenching in his cheek and a sigh rattling somewhere around in his chest. He had no excuse to still be this worried, really, and Dio had never even been in danger, and he didn’t want to throw off something about having a friend aboard because that would mean actively considering the possibility of something having happened and he couldn’t -

He shut his eyes for a moment to try and clear the sudden, blistering ache in his temples, and opened them again to catch the building block again as it unbalanced.

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So Alfred had written to Ari, but not to her. Zelda worked her lower lip between her teeth for a beat before releasing it, trying to contain the different feelings that brought up — she was annoyed, but she was also worried. Because if Alfred was writing to Ari, and if he was sending reports to the Minister's office, and he just wasn't writing her, then — then he just wasn't writing her. And what could that mean?

But there was something wrong with Ari, a look on his face and that weird long blink, and she could not worry about Alfred when Ari was right here in front of her. Zelda was uneasy, because she didn't know how to do this emotional stuff with Ari — she was exceedingly ill-equipped for all of this, especially in tandem with the waiting.

Also, it didn't make sense — Dio was fine, he'd just told her that.

She released the block and reached out to touch her fingers to his elbow. "Ari?"

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AMAZING set by MJ

Zelda didn’t say anything to that news, but he hadn’t looked to see how she’d reacted to it, either - suddenly he felt trapped, trapped in this sitting room, trapped in his life, trapped in his own body, and his throat was so dry he didn’t know if his airways would open enough to breathe.

He felt the touch at his elbow, and covered his face with a hand, rubbing his temples with trembling fingers, covering his eyes, pressing his fingers into skin to remind himself to pull himself together. He had a faint idea to pull himself to his feet and dash out some quick excuse about - needing to check on something and leaving her to watch Elliott and making it as far as the other side of the door, but Ari knew if he got that far and took that moment alone, he wouldn’t be able to put himself together enough to face Zelda again.

And he was trying to avoid crumbling. That was why he’d wanted someone else to be here, that was - why he had to answer her. With something that wouldn’t see everything fall apart if Ben came back alive. When. If. (If he didn’t, everything would probably fall apart anyway.)

So Ari dragged his hand away from his face, cleared his throat forcibly, to try and dislodge the sob that was growing somewhere in there. “Yeah, I’m - fine. It’s just, I - I can’t stand not being there.” And he had always been - somewhere in reach before, somewhere close enough to help.

That was all. That, she would understand.

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   Zelda Darrow

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Zelda felt her breath catch in her throat, watching Ari's hand on his face, his fingers at his temples. She was struck again by how much she didn't know how to do this, because she didn't — she could have comforted Dionisia if Dio was here, but it was Ari, and Zelda didn't see him bend and break. She kept her hand at his elbow. She gave it a squeeze.

She swallowed down the lump in her throat at his words. "Yeah," she said, "But — they'll be okay, right? And we'll be okay, too." It just — sucked right now, and would probably keep right on being terrible until everybody was home and safe and things felt right again.

For now, though, they had this — playing absent-mindedly with Elliott's blocks, Zelda's hand at his elbow, and the feeling that every time she muddled herself further into this situation she was making a mistake.

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   Ari Fisk

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And bless her, Zelda was trying, but it wasn’t as though there was anything on earth she could say; he didn’t dare quite look at her yet but he cast a brief attempt at a smile that way, all the same.

“I hope so,” Ari said, and perhaps if he pretended to believe her it would make him start to actually believe it, and not just cycle through worst-case possibilities for however much longer the ship was gone. “Sorry,” he said, swallowing again and trying to speak more firmly, more levelly, to fix his expression enough to meet her eye. He didn’t quite make it there, but he looked again in her vague direction. “I - just haven’t slept properly, I’m -” Ari trailed off and waved his hand as if to say I know I’m being ridiculous, I know I’m not myself.   

He reached across himself and pressed her hand at his elbow to assure her that it was fine, that he was fine, that preferably she should promptly forget this and think about something else.

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   Zelda Darrow

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All of her conversations with Dio and Ari recently had been at least a little weird, and this was clearly one of those moments. Zelda would find this at least ironic later, but for now she didn't know if she ought to believe her brother, and did not feel like she was properly managing helping.

"Do you want me to stay in Dio's room tonight?" she tried, "I can help with —" she gestured, a small wave of her hand encompassing Elliott "— tomorrow before work. It wouldn't be a pain or anything, I'm just going mad at home."

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AMAZING set by MJ

His immediate instinct was to say oh no, you don’t have to, perhaps because he was - well, far less used to accepting help than offering it. But Ari forced himself to bite that back, to actually consider it. And besides, Zelda had given him excuse enough to say yes - that was not just implicitly admitting I’m a mess right now, I don’t think I can do this alone - by making it sound as if he could be doing her the favour. (Ari expected she had done that entirely on purpose, but that did not make him any less grateful.)

And having her stay for a while would force him to keep it together, wouldn’t it? He still had the urge to flee the room and break down - the emotion was still there, balled up in his chest just waiting for the opportunity - but if Zelda was here he could fight it until there was, one way or the other, some news.

(And perhaps if Alfred or Dionisia wrote to her next he would hear the news sooner.) So. “Well... if you’re sure,” he said, shooting her a smile and, unexpectedly, feeling the faintest touch calmer. He sighed, shifting in place to smile over at Elliott too. “There’s too much food to eat in the house anyway,” he added to Zelda, sounding half-normal again and deciding he might even be able to manage a quick trip to the pantry and back without thinking about the wreck, “if you’d like to help with that.”

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wrap?

  

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